Ultrasound Elastography for Biomedical Applications and Medicine

25 Comb‐push Ultrasound Shear Elastography

Pengfei Song and Shigao Chen

Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

25.1 Introduction

Comb‐push ultrasound shear elastography (CUSE) is one of the acoustic radiation force‐based ultrasound shear wave elastography methods that first introduced the concept of simultaneous generation of multiple shear wave sources, which allows reconstruction of a full field‐of‐view (FOV) shear elasticity map with a single shear wave push‐and‐detection cycle. In conventional ultrasound shear wave elastography, a single shear wave source at a fixed lateral location is typically used for shear wave generation (Figure 25.1a). As a result, the shear wave speed under the shear wave source region cannot be recovered because of the absence of shear waves (Figure 25.1b) [1]. A second challenge in conventional ultrasound shear wave elastography is that as shear waves propagate in tissue, significant shear wave attenuation will occur in areas that are far away from the push beam region (Figure 25.1c), which results in poor shear wave signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR).

Figure 25.1 (a) A schematic plot of an ultrasound push beam and the resulting shear wave propagation direction. The focused ultrasound push beam (indicated by the red shape) produces two shear wave fronts propagating away from the push beam (indicated by the two red arrows ...